A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.

Perhaps unsurprising, given the pivot this post took, I did something akin to bumping the scabbed but essentially still-open wound into a hard surface today. There’s this great comic, Side Quested (first book is out now! And even more is availble to be read online where it financially benefits the creators!), that centers around a trio of young adults, though perhaps centrally around one in particular who found out that the people she had been told were her biological family were actually just raising her in the place of her actual biological parents whose enemies and rivals might have exploited her to hurt them. All througout, this young woman (Charlie), reminds her biological parents that they aren’t really her parents. They may have brought her into existence, but they’ve done precious little to parent her and seem intent on just forcing themselves into her life in a role they have picked for themselves with or without her consent, but none more so than her father who corrects the way she refers to him and her mother constantly. All of which, currently, culminates in a panel where she screams at him that he isn’t her father after a correction during a moment he should have just kept his trap shut.

I didn’t expect that to hit me so deeply. I will admit I picked the scab a little bit earlier this week, by talking to someone who is still fairly early in being cut off from their family, in what turned out to be an unwanted bit of advice (which is on me, but I’ll admit that this whole “cut off your shitty family” thing is incredibly isolating and I’m always looking for people I can talk to who get it), but I didn’t expect this one little panel drive right down into the depths of this still-healing wound in my soul and cause the old familiar pain to flare as sharply as it ever has. It’s an eye-catching panel, with perhaps the first instance of a text bubble changing color for emphasis (and I did just re-read the entire comic for fun and to check the accuracy of my statement: there is one other partial color shift, but the whole panel is descending into darkness, so it’s not JUST the speech bubble) that really drives home who the character is as she loses her temper with a quirk her biological parent refuses to drop no matter how mcuh she refuses his claim over her. Because that is what the statement is. As he insists that she call him her father and his wife her mother, he is insisting on a relationship he has done nothing to earn as he has dragged her out of the life she had into the one he wants for her. It is the exact sort of parental demand that my own would make. That my own have made. That I couldn’t even deny until it was beyond denying and all I could do was cut them out when they refused to properly hear what I had to say and failed to show any of the emotional maturity I required of them.

Grief, in all it’s forms, can strike at any moment, just as intensely as ever. There is often no warning, no way to anticipate when it might come. It is less predictable even than lightning because at least that requires the correct atmospheric conditions. Grief can strike as a result of a random thought popping into your head, because you forgot a comic you’re reading deals with a parent/child relationship that rhymes with your own, because you tried to give someone advice you wished there had been anyone around to give you, because you stumbled across a tiny bit of writing from a time when you were trying to sort out your feelings, or even because you just sat down and sighed in a way that sounded unexpectly like the way your father would sigh as he settled into a chair or the couch to read after dinner. There is no way to soften the blow that I’ve found. Time can help, but nothing can stop these lightning strike moments from feeling as intense and painful as they do. All you can do is carry on living your life and hope you’ve got enough emotional resilience to roll with it when it hits you or that you’ve got some place to retreat to when it proves to be more than you could handle. Weather the strikes as they land and continue to heal, slowly, so that maybe they come less and less often and maybe some of the ones that wrecked you in the past leave a little more of you standing the next time they land a direct hit.